Find out about new titles, local events, and all kinds of TYPE goodies with our monthly newsletter.

MY MUM’S USE OF PUNCTUATION IS REVOLUTIONARY

Our Type Reader for May is Pasha Malla

Pasha Malla has been a
long-time friend of the store. His debut short story collection, The Withdrawal Method, won the
Trillium Book Award, and you’ve probably read his insightful book reviews in
the Globe and Mail. Malla recently left our fair town for the ‘Electric City,’
Hamilton, but he’ll be back in Toronto a bunch later this May in support of his
new novel, Fugue States, the story of
two young men – Ash Dhar, grieving the death of his father, and his best friend
(and pothead drifter) Matt – who undertake a Quixotic quest from Canada to Kashmir.

Celebrate the launch of Pasha Malla’s new novel,
Fugue States, with Penguin Random House Canada and us at The Ossington (61
Ossington Avenue) on Friday, May 26.

PASHA ANSWERS THE TYPE QUESTIONNAIRE

What is the first book you remember loving?In
the Night Kitchen, Maurice Sendak.

What is your favourite virtue in a book?Play.

What do you appreciate most in a book character?Menace.

What character (real or fictional) do you dislike the most?Those without integrity.

If you were to write a non-fiction book about anything, what would it be about?Ettore Majorana. (Editor's note: Ettore Majorana was an Italian theoretical physicist who worked on neutrino masses. He disappeared under mysterious circumstances while travelling by ship from Palermo to Naples.)

Your favourite authors?My
mum, in email form. Her use of punctuation is revolutionary.

Your favourite poets?The
ones who don’t shit all over the other ones.

Your favourite book illustrators?Sean Phillips. Attila Futaki. Graeme Base. Quentin
Blake. And I really like the art for Scary Stories to
Tell in the Dark.

Do you read on public transportation?Yes.

What qualities do you want in a book you’re read while traveling?That it not be about wherever I’m traveling.

What book have you never read but have always meant to? Do you think you will ever read it?The Anatomy of Melancholy. I expect I’ll
continue to take it down off the shelf once a year, poke around a bit for an
afternoon, abandon it on my nightstand, and then return it to the shelf after
two months of forgetting it exists.

What book do you pretend to have read, but in fact have not?The Bible? I pretend to know the stories at least.

If you could force a single celebrity to read a specific book in it’s entirety, who would you chose, and what book would you make them read?I think making any celebrity read their own
unauthorized biography, aloud, to me, in its entirety, over a long distance car
trip, would be really, really fun.

What book(s) are you reading right now?
Literature
Class,
Julio Cortázar. Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders. The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa.